Paradigm shift.  A fundamental change in one’s core understanding of a situation.  It’s hard to do.  It takes abandoning everything you’ve been taught and believed and that made sense, then adopting something totally new and perhaps both untried and unsettling.  It takes going from a belief that the sun goes around the earth to understanding that it’s exactly the opposite.  And, as Galileo found out, there is often a powerful Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith – an Inquisition – ready to attack you for questioning orthodoxy.

In transportation, shifting paradigm means switching from a belief that roads are primarily about carrying through traffic to prioritizing their power to facilitate local neighborhood livability.  It means switching the starting point for road design, even of busy roads, from a highway to a city street – understanding that softening the edges of a highway still results in something very different than a city street with peak-hour flexibility.

Paradigm shifts are often the necessary (even if not sufficient) foundation for a change in an organization’s strategic direction.  The car – and its attendant roads, parking spaces, garages, and dealerships – were once seen as the basis for economic growth and personal success.  We now know better.  We now know that we need a more balance transportation (and energy and land use) agenda.  MassDOT needs to play a central role in this transformation – a fact the state government and MassDOT itself understand as reflected in the Healthy Transportation Compact section of the Transportation Reform Act and in the Greenhouse Gas Emission reduction laws, as well as in MassDOT’s own GreenDOT program with its energy conservation and efficiency goals and its commitment to triple the number of trips made by bike and foot and transit.

But despite constant waving of the new multi-modal banners, MassDOT’s actual work is still a frustrating combination of new rhetoric and old practices. What’s happening around the McGrath/O’Brien Highway is a case in point.   MassDOT’s proposed short-term repair and long-term replacement designs are much, much better than what now exists or what MassDOT had originally planned to do.  But underneath the talk of “boulevards” and “accessibility” is still an 8-lane behemoth justified by faulty assumptions about the inevitability of future traffic growth and traffic engineer’s inability to give priority to anything besides car-movement level of service.

What Somerville needs is the replacement of the highway – no matter what it is called or how many trees are planted alongside – with a design that has as its deepest goal the knitting together of the city’s road-brutalized neighborhoods.   Commuters heading into or out from East Somerville, the Union Square area, and the Innerbelt zone will be as richly served by non-car transportation as any other place in the region.   MassDOT’s opportunity, and its possible paradigm shift, is to start by designing city streets and an over-abundant set of state-of-the-art facilities for non-motorized movement.  Transportation and land use are the twin determinants of much of our built environment.  MassDOT has been working very hard to re-invent itself as a transportation agency rather than as a highway department.  They’ve come a long way.  McGrath is a chance to push further, to show that their commitment to health and sustainability will be expressed not just in words but in concrete – and paint and grass and the revitalization of Somerville.  Continue Reading »

In recent years, bicycling has increased nationwide.  However, the growing numbers are most visible in urban areas where car congestion and mixed-use density make cycling particularly useful, which also gives bicyclists the political clout to push for improved safety facilities.

Bicycling isn’t just faster and cheaper than other forms of urban travel, it’s also healthier.  Regular bicyclists live, on average two years longer than non-cyclists and have a level of fitness equivalent to someone 10 years younger.  Students who bike (or walk) to school perform better on tests, regardless of the amount of other out-of-school physical activity.  Overweight adolescents who bicycle at least half the week are 85% more likely to become normal-weight adults.  The health benefits of cycling have a positive impact 20 times larger than the negative impact of safety risks experienced by cyclists.

Which isn’t to say that anyone wants to be in a bike accident, or that cycling is safe enough.  But there are no “silver bullet” single solutions.  Success requires understanding the full range of strategies and implementing as much as possible of each.

Around 75% of bicycling accidents are “solo” events, due to potholes or the rider’s own errors.  But these tend to cause minor injuries rather than death.  Being hit by a car, truck, or bus is more serious.  Aggressive passing, turning into a cyclist’s path, speeding, running red lights or stop signs – these are the driver actions that are at least a contributing cause in up to 85% of cyclist fatalities.  According to the Boston Bicycle program, the city had 8,329 car crashes in 2012 of which 426 involved a bicyclist, leading to 5 cyclist deaths.  The small increase in bike injuries from 2010 to 2012 occurred almost entirely during the darker winter months when the rent-a-bike Hubway stations were closed.  And while only 2% of Emergency Room visits resulting from bike accidents are for head injuries, these lead to 36% of the subsequent move from ER triage to a hospital admission.

Just as Medicine focuses on making sick people better, there are ways at both the individual and policy levels to reduce the severity of accidents.  Public Health, in contrast, seeks to prevent people from becoming ill in the first place – and there are also a very broad range of actions at both the individual and policy levels to reduce the likelihood that an accident will happen.

Post-accident, injury reducing actions are mostly and best done voluntarily by individuals (for example: wearing a MIPS helmet or signing up for a bike skills training class) although there are a few things that can be done on a policy basis to protect people from accident-caused injury (such as requiring trucks and buses to have “side guards”).   Fortunately, however, there are many things that can be done to reduce the odds of having an accident in the first place.  These range from increased training, to road design (providing more traffic-separated protected bike lanes of various kinds), to bans on distracting driving (and cycling!), and more.  Increased safety for bicyclists, and for everyone else, requires understanding each of the approaches suggested by each strategy, and then making sure that as many as possible get implemented.

Policy changes can be focused on the transportation context or on society at large.  As with the public health hierarchy illustrated in CDC Director Dr. Thomas Friedman’s Health Impact Pyramid the sweet spot is somewhere in the middle – actions that provide the greatest amount of improvement for the largest number of people at the least per-person cost and are most likely to be both technically and politically do-able.  Continue Reading »

Genie’s are, by mythological definition, very powerful.  They can open cave walls, turn dirt into gold, and make carpets fly.  They are also devious, granting wishes in ways that turn benefits into burdens – an autonomous force from whom, in exchange for letting them out of the lamp, we can demand short-term assistance but whose ultimate actions and effect are beyond our control.

The unpredictable long-term impact of liberated genies crossed my mind last Friday as I stared out my window at the absolutely empty streets and sidewalks.  The marathon bombing victims were in the hospital, the killers were shooting in the streets.  An entire metropolitan area had been asked to “shelter in place” – to lock ourselves down – and we, myself included, complied with a willing conformity even greater than during previous emergencies such as when we were ordered to stay off the streets during last winter’s blizzard. We all, myself included, applauded at the equally unprecedented coordination among every type of police and emergency agency and every level of government, rather than the turf-protecting disarray that has so frequently characterized such interaction.  We all, myself included, were amazed and relieved that so many images of the bombers were able to be found and analyzed so quickly from so many sources and merged with information from cell phones and even more sources that we had never before realized could be so effectively tapped.  We wanted the situation dealt with, and we were all, myself included, very glad that the bastards were found, using any means necessary.

But looking out the window I suddenly thought, “it wasn’t so long ago that I was part of a small minority of the population who were fighting to stop the US invasion of Southeast Asia, and most of the country – including elected officials and police leaders at nearly every level of government – thought we were traitors; now that there has been a precedent of unrolling the full might of the government over an entire region, will it become easier to use the same tools to attack the next effort by US citizens to stop the country from catastrophic actions.”

The answer is obviously “yes.”   In fact,  given how frequently local police and the national FBI have tracked, harassed, framed, and even killed  people whose opinions they find offensive, both in the past and today, it is difficult to imagine that these tools are not already being used in less dramatic ways for the same purposes.  Continue Reading »

Enthusiastic support for Public-Private Partnerships (P3) seems to extend across the entire political spectrum. The P3 label is a huge umbrella, providing space for small-government conservatives who think business can do things better, pragmatic liberals who want to harness the resources and energy of the private sector during a time of government fiscal constraint, and innovation progressives looking for strategies to extend the public sector’s positive influence.

Many government leaders, elected or appointed, also wave the pro-P3 banner.  For good reason:  Public-Private-Partnerships can substitute for budget increases or even fill-in after budget cuts. A P3 allows public agencies to potentially tap into expertise or funding they would otherwise lack, allowing them to do mission-accomplishing things that would be otherwise unlikely or even impossible. The private partners sometimes add legitimacy to a project and can provide powerful institutional voices calling for increased public funding in their area of interest.  P3s can also leverage public assets to promote job-creating private investment, including targeted training and entry-level opportunities for underserved populations or in key growth industries.  In some areas, as in parks, the private partner’s ability to see revenue opportunities in a traditionally “passive” asset adds to the sustainability of the public resource.

Public-Private-Partnerships are relationships – structured as anything from simple gifts to informal working relationships to legally enforceable contracts around some task, service, or project – between a public (or semi-public) agency and some non-governmental non-profit or for-profit organization.   The contract can be a lease for use of a public asset by the private partner, usually with some degree of exclusivity and control over its use by others, and often combined with a promise to improve and/or maintain it for the duration.  Or even the sale of public assets either absolutely or “in-effect” through extremely long-term leases or more subtle de-facto control over a particular location or asset.

MANAGING DIVERSE MOTIVATIONS

Like market and product regulation, P3s are a way to try to align private effort and investment with public purposes while managing the inherent tension between the two.  Too often, Public Agency officials want private sector dollars and help but don’t want to either give up control or allow any return on the investment. Too often, private partners think Public Officials are just selfishly (or incompetently) making things difficult, and come across as pretentious or arrogant rather than respectful of the public agency’s own plans.  For a partnership to succeed, the public agency has to have a predictable, transparent, and timely decision-making process around partnership proposals that makes it less tempting for well-endowed proposers to make a political end run to the Governor’s office or the Legislative leadership. And the private proposer has to use its relatively less constrained freedom to innovate as a way to enhance public value rather than simply self-aggrandizement.

P3s hang off the public sector in many directions, each of which has its particular characteristics and issues.  They are becoming a standard part of Park and Open Space operations, especially around the new types of downtown mini-parks that are expensive to create and program and are often run as economic development projects by nearby Business Associations or Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) rather than the city.  In transportation, a public-private partnership is often, as stated by Mass. Secretary of Transportation Richard Davey, simply “an alternative financing strategy.”  And education-oriented partnerships can range from truly learning-helpful to insidiously channeling the next generation of consumers towards brand loyalty.  A lot of what is called Partnership is simply outsourcing – the privatization of our prison system, social services, and many other once-public activities has had as many negative as positive results.  Continue Reading »

“It’s not the vehicles,” points out MBTA General Manager Dr. Beverly Scott, “it’s the people and places.”  She’s right – transportation is not ultimately about moving things from one place to another, not about the roads or rails, but about the world that grows up around the travel routes.  The value of transportation comes from the ways it improves the health, prosperity, and well-being of the lives around it.  That is why LivableStreets Alliance chose its name. And that is why it is so inexplicable that the Massachusetts’ Legislature has once again “kicked the can down the road” by drastically underfunding our transportation needs.

The Governor first released a huge 10-year transportation plan, “The Way Forward”, and then asked for a huge increase in revenue – nearly $1.9 billion a year – to cover both transportation and educational improvements needed to maintain, and in some ways to simply regain, our economic competitiveness.  Next step is a bond bill to provide the funds, to be paid back via the new revenue, to get started.  (The education money will go towards universal pre-kindergarten, extended hours for struggling schools, and millions in reverse some previous and massive cut-backs to public higher education.)   As several business advisory groups have repeatedly said, not investing in those areas will eventually cost even more – an estimated $11 billion in property damage, injury and loss of life as well as the loss of up to 15,600 jobs!

The Legislators’ political fear is clear.  Most of them intend to run for re-election. They remember that Bill Weld ended a long streak of Democratic gubernatorial success by running against the “big spenders on Beacon Hill.” It will be electorally useful to say, “I helped hold the line.”    However, a majority of the state’s residents support raising taxes and fees dedicated to transportation (61% and 62% for gas tax and income tax respectively).   The sobering experience of unemployment and budget cuts has reduced public support for the Tea Party’s reactionary anti-tax, anti-government hysteria.

Even more important, from an Establishment perspective, while the business community used to be the primary denouncer of “Taxachusetts,” most of their organizations are now in favor of increased spending on transportation and education.   Even the Massachusetts Taxpayer’s Association proposed transportation spending several hundred million more than the Legislature.  One reason is that, as another group has pointed out, “taxes in Massachusetts are stubbornly average, [by both] income [and] gross state product measures…. taxes are actually lower in Massa­chusetts than they are in nominally low-tax states like Kansas, West Virginia, and Indiana….They have been for the past three decades, and they would remain so even under Patrick’s … $1.9 billion tax proposal.”  A new national study ranks Massachusetts “the most competitive state for business, again!”

There is, of course, another perspective. The state is eventually going to have to upgrade its transportation system – or risk economic deterioration.  As both the Boston Globe and Governor Patrick have said, if you’re going to get attacked for raising taxes anyway why not go high enough so that your constituents gain something of real benefit as a result?  Isn’t it worse to have to go back and ask for more later on?  If you’re in for a dime, you’re in for the dollar!

THE GOVERNOR’S PENNY

Of course, not every component of the Governor’s revenue plan is as strong as the overall logic.  Because of its flat-rate income and sales taxes, the state’s current tax system is regressive; the lower a family’s income the larger the percentage they pay in taxes, only partially mitigated by exempting food and other necessities from the sales tax and exempting the first few dollars from the income tax.  The proposal to drop the sales tax by 1.75 points and double the personal exemption are solid, progressive moves.  (This would exempt income from state taxes: going up to $8,800 for an individual taxpayer $13,600 for a head of household, and $17,600 for a married couple filing jointly.)  Raising the income tax by 1%, which would only have a significant impact on families earning over $100,000 a year, would have a similarly small but valuable progressive impact.

The Administration argues that  these changes would financially compensate for eliminating a number of deductions, some of which are irrelevant (such as one for coal miners) but many of which have long positive histories, are extremely popular, and have vocal beneficiaries – including those for charitable giving, day-care expenses, adoption fees, renewable energy credits, taxes on scholarships and tuition aid, and others.  Profits from home sales would be counted as income rather than capital gains. It will be difficult to argue against any of these on a stand-alone basis and it’s unlikely that the overall income and sales tax adjustments will mollify the people who benefit from these niche measures.  However rational the off-setting arithmetic, these are political non-starters.

More feasibly, the Governor also proposes to raise the tax on tobacco while eliminating the loophole that allows “other tobacco products” to be subsidized by a tax exemption.  Similarly, no longer classifying sugar-sweetened candy and beverages as food would eliminate their tax exemption subsidy and raise new revenue – at least partially for public health programs.  Gas taxes and highway tolls, which haven’t been adjusted for decades, would be raised and indexed to inflation or otherwise set up for periodic increases.   More problematically, MBTA fees would also go up on a regular basis.

Finally, the Governor would change the way certain business activities are taxed.  In particular, Massachusetts would fall in line with about half the states and treat modifications to canned programs and custom software as a “product” rather than a “service” which has a lower tax rate.  While business groups agree that transportation system improvements are desperately needed and applaud the proposed lowering of the sales tax, they oppose the income tax changes and decry the software (and other) classification changes as “opening a Pandora’s box” leading to similar treatment for custom web design to cloud computing, data storage, computer programming and software installations.

At the same time, not every component of the Transportation Plan is as defensible as the overall need.  In particular, the proposed $850 million restoration of South Station to its previous size is a good idea, but doing it in a way that doesn’t at least start solving the deeper problem of the missing connection between South and North Stations is simply stupid.  Or, as former Governor Dukakis describes it, “unnecessary and irrelevant and a colossal waste of money.”

THE LEGISLATURE’S VERSION

The Legislature drops all the tax code changes.  In terms of transportation, there are several good aspects to the Legislator’s 5-year strategy.  It will allow MassDOT to stop having to borrow money to pay for operating expenses, a practice that adds a 50% surcharge to every bill.  It covers the MBTA’s FY14 structural deficit and forward funds the Regional Transit Agencies instead of forcing them to repay borrowed funds at the end of each year, giving them a bit of extra funds for future capital investment.  It gives an additional $100 million to municipalities for local road work, and raises the gas tax (the first time since 1991) a couple cents with an inflation index for future adjustments.   A $1 increase in the cigarette tax and the inclusion of other tobacco products will both raise funds and immediately reduce youth tobacco usage.

It’s better than nothing, but simply not enough.  It does not cover the cost of repairing our transportation system’s lack of repair, much less to expand it to meet current needs.  There is little in it for expansion of our pedestrian, transit, or bicycling facilities.  It may jeopardize the state’s ability to get up to a half-billion dollars in federal aid for the Green Line extension, putting even more of the burden on local taxpayers.  It doesn’t make our tax structure more progressive or bring us in line with other states in how we treat businesses.  Most troubling, it seems to rely too heavily on big future MBTA fare increases along with higher tolls and registry fees.

WHAT TO DO

While the Legislative leadership is going to get their bill passed, if it lacks a veto-proof 2/3 majority in both houses they will have to negotiate a final version with the Governor, which may lead to a more useful compromise – assuming both sides stop calling each other names!

No matter the vote, Transportation Advocates are pushing for a number of focused amendments that will dedicate whatever increased tax money is available to transportation, lock in a minimum funding level for RTAs, create incentives for MassDOT and the MBTA to boost transit ridership, place any revenue from RMV and vehicle inspection fees in the Transportation Fund as well as the money currently going into the Underground Storage Tank Fund.

Public health activists join transportation advocates in also wanting to incorporate an incentive fund to encourage municipalities to adopt “Complete Streets” policies to facilitate “active transportation.”  (They are also pushing to have at least a portion of the tobacco revenues dedicated to health, with the “other tobacco products” money going to the new Prevention Trust.)

Call your state Senator and Representative – today!  Let them know what you want!  A lot of this will be decided THIS WEEK!

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Related Previous Blog Posts:

> GOVERNOR PATRICK’S FY2014 BUDGET PROPOSAL: A Promising Start To Future Improvement

> TRANSPORTATION AND HEALTH PROPOSALS: Legislation Endorsed by the Mass Public Health Association

> TRANSPORTATION FINANCES: Why Saving Public Transportation Requires Helping Car Drivers

> GREEN LINE EXTENSION: State Needs To Make The Trains Run On Time

> Picking Transportation Spending Priorities

If you build it, they will come.  Given the starting assumptions, Boston planners have come up with an excellent design for the reconstruction of Melnea Cass Boulevard in lower Roxbury.  It is a layout worthy of the Urban Ring vision that inspired it.

Unfortunately, the assumptions are flawed and, therefore, so is the proposed design.  The Field of Dreams magic doesn’t work if you only build half a baseball field.  And building a short stretch of roadway won’t bring Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) service, or any other kind of public transportation, if there are no plans to build the rest of the system.  Melnea Cass Boulevard needs improvements that will promote economic development, reknit the abutting neighborhoods, and facilitate alternatives to car traffic. Money is available, up to $9.5 million, using state and city funds to supplement a $5.5 million earmark Congressman Capuano inserted in a federal bill.  But for all the still-needed functionality of a city-encircling transit system, an Urban Ring to complement our mostly in-and-out commuter lines, the city’s currently proposed design – which will create a 0.9-mile segment of the long-planned Bus Rapid Transit network – will serve neither the still-needed Urban ring nor the through-rushing car commuters, nor the adjacent neighborhoods.

The critical component of the proposed redesign is the insertion of two additional lanes for eventual use by BRT buses, and until then as a “priority lane” by emergency vehicles and various buses that use all or part of Melnea Cass – although the temptation to allow cars might be hard to resist.  Because a “transit reserve” was created along the road after the BRA wiped out the residential neighborhood in the 1960s, no private property needs to be taken for the project, which will simply occupy the existing “right of way.”  However, even though the official term for the project is “reconstruction” the reality is that the new design is a dramatic, 40-foot widening of the asphalt.

The required 40-foot expansion of the road will create a longer, 108-foot crossing for pedestrians (similar to Beacon Street at Coolidge Corner) mitigated by a mid-passage pedestrian island.  It would remove up to 40 feet of grass and trees from most of the Lower Roxbury (northeast) side, as well as trees and planting adjacent to the townhouses on the Madison Park (southwest) side of the Boulevard.   The 200 mature trees to be eliminated would be replaced by 300 (admittedly less attractive or shady) young saplings and a storm-water-handling bio-swale.

There will be 8’ sidewalks on both sides of the boulevard with a two-way bike path on the in-land side. On-street parking will be added along several blocks to both support future retail shops and calm currently fast traffic.  At key intersections, left-turning lanes will eliminate a major cause of wait times and backed-up congestion.

However, most of these improvements could be done without adding the two lanes, the component that has sparked intense community opposition.  The “Friends and Neighbors of Melnea Cass Boulevard” would like to see traffic speed reduced through retiming the traffic lights for a 20 mph signal progression through the Boulevard, longer walk signal duration with raised cross-walks, and improved bike path (on both sides of the road, as planned in the Roxbury Strategic Master Plan) connections with the Southwest Corridor path and the South Bay Harbor Trail to make an inviting connection to downtown.   (While pedestrian connections are vital, bicycling is better for weight control because most people walk too slowly to impact calorie accumulation.)  The community groups also support better bus service throughout the area on both Key and Regular route as described in the Roxbury/Dorchester/Mattapan Transportation Improvements Study.

The community critics are correct in pointing out that it is hard to show that the current design will achieve any of the Melnea Cass Project’s own goals to “return the street to the neighborhood”, “create a street for the community rather than for vehicle traffic passing through”, “enhance pedestrian safety”, and “encourage activity/create attractive front yards for new developments.”

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Motor vehicles hit more bicyclists and pedestrians on Commonwealth Avenue in front of Boston University than anywhere else in the city.  Last year, five bicyclists were killed in the metro-Boston area, in almost every case by getting hit then run over by a truck (which, in almost every case, made the fact that they were wearing a helmet irrelevant).  One of those happened on Comm. Ave.  It’s partly that a growing number of BU students ride bikes, and not all of them are as careful as they should be.  It’s partly that drivers aren’t as careful as they should be, especially truck drivers making right turns which, because of the size of their vehicle, they have to do illegally from the left lane, compounding the danger caused by their mirrors’ large blind spot.  It’s partly that, as Boston Traffic Department (BTD) Commissioner Thomas J. Tinlin has pointed out, “It’s the one spot in the city that truly has all modes of transportation” – cars, trucks, trolleys, cyclists, pedestrians, skate boarders, and more.  But mostly it’s that the street layout is simply unsafe.

To its credit, BTD and the Boston Bike Program have come up with a number of innovative improvements for Comm. Ave. which, if they prove effective, may be used in other danger areas as well.  New signage will tell drivers to “yield to bicycles when turning right” and “suggest” that cars go no more than 25 mph even though the official speed limit (set by state law) is 30.  Bike lanes will be outlined with recessed highway reflectors on wider (6”) lane-lines. Non-skid green paint will show the continuation of the bike lane through intersections.

The city’s proposals are real improvements over current conditions and will bring the bike lanes to a higher safety level without having to do expensive construction. (Hopefully, they will also fix any pot-holed sections of bike lane pavement, as well as ensure that all drains are properly working along the way.)  Of course, better still would be protected bike lanes, created either by installing rubber posts (removable during snow season) along with cross-hatch striping, or by a curb separation that forms a street-level or sidewalk-level cycle track.  And there should be separate bicycle traffic lights synchronized with Green Line, car, and pedestrian signals to create a “green wave” street allowing steady progress at a safe 15 mph.
Unfortunately, cyclists will continue to be killed on Commonwealth Avenue, and elsewhere, unless police enforce the “no right turn from the left lane” law — meaning that distributors will have to use appropriate-sized trucks for city deliveries instead of gigantic 18-wheelers.  Just as important: both trucks and buses, starting with public vehicles, must be required to have “side guards” that prevent hit pedestrians and cyclists from getting thrown under the wheels.

But the biggest long-term issue for safety on Commonwealth Avenue — for car occupants and pedestrians as much as cyclists — is what will happen with the Turnpike overpass area between Mountfort Street and the BU Bridge.  The city and state are being pressured to adopt a plan that would prioritize car traffic, recreating conditions that will be unsafe for bicyclists and pedestrians – including potentially eliminating the new bike lanes on the BU Bridge. Unless MassDOT and BTD stand up against this violation of their own Complete Streets policies, the presence of reflectors, green paint, and thicker lines further up the road won’t mean very much.

The resurgence of bicycle as a valuable transportation vehicle over the past twenty years, first in Europe and now in the US, a still very much a work-in-progress.  Boston has taken progressive and creative positions in several key road redesign projects, most recently by opting for the “surface option” on Rutherford Avenue in Charlestown which will help re-knit the neighborhood across the current asphalt wound.  Cars are becoming more expensive, traffic congestion more pervasive, and people are looking for better alternatives.  We need to increase safety for everyone on the road regardless of their method of travel.  Hopefully, these first steps on Commonwealth Avenue are just the beginning of a continuing process of experimentation and improvement.

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Related Previous Postings:

> A BICYCLE BOULEVARD ON COMMONWEALTH AVENUE?

> ENOUGH KILLING: How to Make Bike-Car Collisions Less Deadly

> VULNERABLE ROAD USERS (VRU) PROTECTION LAWS: “Whoever Can Do The Most Damage Has To Be The Most Careful”

> SIGNS, PAINT, AND FLEXIBILITY: Creative No-Cost Ways To Improve Road Intelligibility

The environmental movement has taught us that it’s a lot less harmful, difficult, and expensive to prevent toxins from entering the environment than to treat the problems poison creates once it is in our bodies and our world.    Even our medical system, which is essentially about treating sickness after it occurs, is beginning to put more emphasis on “preventive medicine” – the early detection and management of disease.

But the opposite of disease is not early detection, its wellness – staying healthy.   And one of the ways to do that, to be physically and emotionally well, is to be physically active.   According to the national Centers for Disease Control (CDC), “adults need at least 2 and 1/2 hours (150 minutes) a week of aerobic physical activity. This should be at a moderate level, such as a fast-paced walk for no less than 10 minutes at a time.”  The effort pays off in lower rates of obesity, high blood pressure, osteoarthritis, several kinds of cancer, diabetes, coronary heart disease and stroke.

You can be active by spending hours running in place or going to a gym, but it’s more likely that you’ll get in the needed exercise if it is part of your daily routine – as part of your commute, running errands and seeing friends, and socializing on the weekends. Facilitating daily routine exercise is one of the many jobs of our transportation system – making it easy, inviting, and even inevitable for people of all ages and abilities to safely walk and bicycle, while supported by a robust public transportation system.

• A study of over 3,200 overweight adults found that a good diet and walking 2.5 hours/week reduced their risk of developing diabetes by 58%. Participants aged 60 and older reduced their risk by 71%.

• Men who commute to work on public transportation are 44.6% less likely to be overweight or obese, probably due to the physical activity they get at the beginning and end of each trip, getting rid of the energy equivalent of a pound of body fat every six weeks.

• Of the women in the Harvard School of Public Health Nurses’ Health Study, those who walked 3 or more hours/week reduced their risk of a coronary event by 35% compared with women who did not walk.  The risk of death from breast and uterine cancer were reduced 19% in those who walked 1 to 3 hours per week, by 54% for walking 3 to 5 hours / week.

Any physical activity is better than none – even jiggling your body while sitting in front of the TV – but maximizing the benefits of walking requires a brisk pace that few people normally use.  However, slow, habitual cycling at an easy 10 mph, typical of many in-city commutes, has been shown to significantly increase fitness and longevity, even for people who are already active in intense recreational sports, giving regular cyclists an average level of fitness equivalent to people ten years younger than themselves.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we each truly had a choice about how we moved around – if enough was spent on transit, cycling, and walking facilities to make each of them safe and accessible for all? Unfortunately, our current transportation system falls unhealthily short: a CDC study found that almost 40 percent of Americans had not walked for 10 straight minutes in the previous seven days.    Whether or not Massachusetts diverts from that national reality and, instead,  creates a wellness-enhancing environment is significantly dependent on what happens with MassDOT’s proposed 10 year transportation plan, “The Way Forward”, along with an entourage of complimentary policies such as GreenDOT and Mode Shift – and all these are dependent on significant new revenue to meet our statewide transportation needs.

Of course, neither budgets nor plans and policies are enough to make things actually happen.  Advocacy is a critical part of the fuel that turns the engine of change.  And effective Advocacy requires us to both know what we’re talking about and then get involved.   In addition to what you can learn on the Transportation for Massachusetts website, visit our members’ websites to learn more. .  And when you’ve made up your mind, let your legislative representative know – the Metropolitan Area Planning Commission (MAPC) website lets you enter your zip code and the automatically provides a personalizable template addressed to the appropriate officials.  Use it – several times! – democracy only happens when we use it.

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Potentially as fast and as scheduled as rail and subways, but costing a fraction as much to construct, Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) is one of the hot topics in transportation planning these days.  Even MassDOT is looking into it.

Full or Maximum BRT is like a railroad, but without tracks or trains.  The vehicles are air conditioned, the seats comfortable.  BRT buses run within their own corridor, unencumbered by car congestion, able to achieve speeds comparable to (and sometimes faster than) light rail trolleys.   Passengers prepay, wait in comfortable stations, and quickly board from accessible car-level platforms.   There is room for Express lines to pass “local” stops which are, themselves, spaced further apart than typical bus stops, speeding the trip.  Advanced Information Technology (IT) is used to track vehicle location, inform passengers, and facilitate fare collection, administration, and public accountability.

Exemplary BRT systems, such as those in Bogota Columbia and Ottawa, Canada, were all specially built on new right-of-way corridors.  In other cities, such as Los Angeles, BRT systems were carved out of existing roadways.  In every case, the BRT systems were given special branding using intensive PR campaigns to distinguish them from the low-status regular bus system.  Like rail, BRT triggers and channelizes economic growth along the transit corridor, encouraging business development around its stops and raising property values – an effect that can be a powerful tool for city planning, as Cleveland is now demonstrating in its medical district transit.

Massachusetts’ first attempt to set up a BRT service, the Silver Line, is now generally recognized (even by MassDOT) as falling much short of Full BRT.  The second attempt, a last-minute proposal to install BRT on Blue Hill Avenue, got killed by community fury at having the project announced without previous local involvement in the planning process.  Despite the potential benefits the project would bring to adjoining low-income neighborhoods, community distrust of MassDOT was too strong for the proposal’s shortcomings to be resolved in the limited time available for the particular funding source.

Nothing discredits an idea like a terrible first experience. But BRT is too good an idea to die.  MassDOT is now exploring ways to improve and expand the Silver Line from South Station to Chelsea and working with the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP) to identify other promising corridors.

Expanding and upgrading our fixed rail system (passenger trains, trolleys, and freight) is still an essential foundation for future economic growth – not to mention preventing highway gridlock from getting even worse, improving air and water quality, providing a supportive backbone for smart growth, and making active transportation an easier choice.  But fixed rail is expensive to build and, by definition, fixed in place – as is Full BRT.

We should push for BRT.  But we need to welcome BRT projects which take advantage of bus flexibility by allowing the vehicles to spend some time acting like more a regular bus service to do what fixed systems can’t.  Even more, we also need to push for improvements in the rest of the regular bus system that will pay off in both increased usage and lower operating costs, while reducing some of the lingering inequities of our transportation system.  For example, despite its BRT shortcomings, T records show that the Silver Line surface segment carries more passengers than any other bus line, has a better on time performance, and costs less per rider.

Of course, today, in Massachusetts, unless the state Legislature quickly approves substantial new revenues within the next 8 weeks, instead of exploring BRT options the MBTA will be forced to begin over $100 million worth of devastating fare increases and service cutbacks.  And next year it will have to do it again, while the Regional Transportation Authorities outside the Metropolitan area continue being unable to provide even basic service to their patrons.  Political commentators are now saying that unless members of the public soon start telling their Representatives to say “yes” to new revenue the state’s new 10-year transportation plan, The Way Forward, is dead.  Isn’t it time that we started making our transportation system better instead of fighting to merely keep it alive?
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Bills submitted by the Governor, by Legislative Leadership, or in response to a media-enflamed crises can go from idea to law very quickly.  The many thousands of other proposals have to wind their way through a very complicated and multi-stage process.  Almost every proposal has to go through several different committees and at least one public hearing.  Committee chairs have to decide which of the submissions to prioritize, balancing demands from leadership, other committee members, and their own constituency.  Opponents have to be negotiated with and compromises reached.  The vast majority of bills are either “sent to study” or simply never reported out of Committee and therefore never receive an up/down vote by the full House or Senate membership.   Even for those bills that pass the crucial “get out of committee with a positive recommendation” milestone, very little gets settled until a deadline hits or until the two-year session comes to an end, at which point a proposal either is voted up or down or has to start all over again from the very beginning in the next two-year Legislative session. It’s slow, seldom fully transparent, and often quixotic.

But it all starts with the initial submission of a proposed Act by a lead sponsor.  Here are some of the submissions for the just-starting 188^th General Court – the Massachusetts Legislature.  Without significant public pressure, few of them are likely to pass and those that do are likely to be significantly revised along the way.  If you feel that any of these are worthy of support (or opposition), please contact the sponsoring legislator, or your own representative, or the associated Advocacy Group.

This blog focuses on bills endorsed by the Mass Public Health Association (MPHA) and the state-wide ACT Fresh Coalition that MPHA helps lead (and to which LivableStreets Alliance serves as a Leadership Team member).  Building on Massachusetts’ long history of national leadership on public health issues, MPHA and its legislative allies have recently won the nation’s first Prevention and Wellness Trust Fund, strong regulations to improve school nutrition, and a state Food Policy Council.

ACT Fresh’s current legislative agenda includes issues ranging from Active Transportation to improving access to healthy food.  Subsequent postings will cover proposals endorsed by Mass Bike, Walk Boston, and Transportation For Massachusetts (T4Mass).

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